To find actors, he used standard online casting calls and paid fair rates for non-union work, but his eccentricities are still apparent in these exchanges. Klara Landrat, who plays Dylan’s pill-addicted wife in Fateful Findings, informed me via email that he never gave the actors a full script, asking them to learn only their own scenes. Landrat, who has yet to see Fateful Findings, has no complaints about working with Breen. She says, “I think he might seem aloof to others, but I don’t consider that odd, especially since this industry is saturated with ‘odd’ or ‘off’ people. Personally, I found him very nice: kind and polite with a cool edge.” As for some of the more notable Breenisms of the movie, including his penchant for having characters repeat lines of dialogue for seemingly no reason, she says, “I found the repetitiveness curious, though I kept in mind that Pinter and Meisner used it avidly,” an explanation that sounds, at the very least, highly generous to Breen.
I also asked Landrat about Breen’s penchant for appearing naked in his own films. Breen’s ass, like Wiseau’s ass before it, makes extended onscreen cameos. In both Double Down and Fateful Findings, Breen is naked and wrapped around a barely dressed woman. In Fateful Findings, that woman is Landrat. Not quite naked in a wet night slip, she awkwardly showers with a nude Breen, whose face is bandaged and leaking fake blood. “The fact that the director wanted to have things done in a certain way is not ‘off,’” she says, but the footage itself tells a different story. Landrat gamely tries to play the part of a loving wife, but the shot is so bizarre that it’s impossible to blame her for looking uncomfortable. It’s both a totally egregious excuse for Breen to do some naked cuddling with an attractive woman and a moment that epitomizes the strange appeal of Fateful Findings. Why is he in the shower with those bandages on? How has he not passed out from blood loss? Why is this woman getting her night slip wet? Do we really have to see his ass?
Actress Tommie Vegas, who appeared in I Am Here…. Now, has a less-favorable perception of the auteur. “He pretty much lives up to his strange reputation,” she told me, “He has a very set idea of how he wanted it to look and how he wanted everything to appear. Sometimes you would think maybe he was about to go off the deep end.” While Vegas never canoodled with a naked Breen, she felt uncomfortable when he asked her to unbutton her shirt beyond the point where it could safely conceal her cleavage. As she puts it, “Even just the way that the camera’s angled when you watch it, [it’s] like the whole purpose of that was hopefully the wind is going to blow open my shirt and you see my boobs.” When she finally saw the film—after Breen made her buy her own copy—she was so unimpressed that she turned it off after 30 minutes.
“It’s just not exactly my cup of tea,” she says, “and I personally would probably never work with him again.” She then adds, “But props to him for continuing to do it and having these followers. He’s doing something right, I guess.”